Just a few days ago, I wrote about the Library of Congress’ new report on digital preservation (which itself followed the report of the Section 108 Study Group issued last March).  Now, the Commission of the European Communities has released a green paper entitled Copyright in the Knowledge Economy, which discusses, among other things, digital preservation, the making available of digitized works, and orphan works.

Hat tip: LibraryJournal.com

The report studies problems of digital preservation by looking at the copyright laws of four countries, including the United States.  It finds:

Digital preservation is vital to ensure that works created and distributed in digital form will continue to be available over time to researchers, scholars and other users. Digital works are ephemeral, and unless preservation efforts are begun soon after such works are created, they will be lost to future generations. Although copyright and related laws are not the only obstacle to digital preservation activities, there is no question that those laws present significant challenges.

See also the Section 108 Study Group Report, issued earlier this year, which discusses copyright law and digital preservation.

Google said it had now agreed to provide lawyers for Viacom and a class-action group led by the Football Association of England, a large viewership database that blanks out YouTube username and Internet address data that could be used to identify individual video watchers.

The parties are still working towards a separate agreement concerning YouTube employee data, an issue I wrote about yesterday.

Viacom wants to know which videos YouTube employees have watched and uploaded to the site, and Google is refusing to provide that information, CNET News has learned.

This dispute is the reason the two companies, and lawyers representing a group of other copyright holders suing Google, have failed to reach a final agreement on anonymizing personal information belonging to YouTube users, according to two sources close to the situation.

From a discovery standpoint, I’m not sure what Google’s rationale might be for refusing to hand over employee data.  If anything, as the CNet article points out, employee data might be highly relevant to Viacom’s claims and detrimental to Google’s DMCA safe harbor defense.  What did the employees do?  Did they upload infringing videos?  Did they have actual knowledge of infringement?

In any case, this underscores why it’s a bad idea to leave privacy protections to those who profit from gathering our data.  It also makes Google seem to be more protective of its employees than of the public.  As TechCrunch put it today:

Google’s self imposed code of conduct is “Don’t be evil.”  It doesn’t say “don’t be evil unless there’s important litigation at stake.”  Google’s reputation is on the line, and how they respond will show their true character.  They’ve shown they’ll go to bat for employees, now it’s time for them to show they’ll go to bat for their users.

Hat tip: Gigalaw.

What would be enough to mobilize the public?  In 2006, Ed Felten suggested that a privacy Exxon Valdez “will have to be a leak of information so sensitive as to be life-shattering.”  But how sensitive is our viewing of, for example, Harry Potter Puppet Pals?  It’s creepy to think of lawyers having access to it, but is it life-shattering?  Nonetheless, it appears that the public, companies, and Congress are becoming more attuned to privacy matters.  Just last week, Google and Yahoo both recently endorsed the idea of privacy legislation before the Senate Commerce Committee.

In the meantime, what the the litigants doing?  The NYTimes BITS blog notes, “A week after Google and Viacom both said they hoped to agree to make YouTube viewing data anonymous before Google hands the information to Viacom, no agreement has been signed.”  (Emphasis added.)  The parties blame each another.  A Google lawyer says: “If Viacom refuses to allow us to anonymize viewing history, we will seek review by the court.”  A Viacom spokesperson counters:

Viacom suggested the initiative to anonymize the data, and we have been prepared to accept anonymous information since day one.  We hope that Google will turn its focus back to anonymizing the data they are required to deliver, and spend less time making statements about why they won’t get it done.

It’s not especially clear what the parties are doing or how things might be resolved.  As I blogged recently, an earlier Times article initially stated that the parties were “working to protect the anonymity of YouTube viewers.”  (Emphasis added.)  A few hours later, the Times article was edited to say that the parties were “hoping to come up with a way to protect the anonymity of YouTube viewers.”  (Emphasis added.)  Apparently the parties’ resolve was tempered from “work” to mere “hope.”  The parties need to do better, especially Google, which collected and retained all the information.

Plaintiff has a great deal to say,
But it seems he skipped Rule 8(a),
His Complaint is too long,
Which renders it wrong,
Please re-write and re-file today.

Hat tip to my St. Thomas colleague Fred Light for sending this to me.

Although NARA [i.e., the National Archives and Records Administration] has responsibilities for oversight of agencies’ records and records management programs and practices, including conducting inspections or surveys, performing studies, and reporting results to the Congress and the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), in recent years NARA’s oversight activities have been primarily limited to performing studies. NARA has conducted no inspections of agency records management programs since 2000, because it uses inspections only to address cases of the highest risk, and no recent cases have met its criteria. In addition, NARA has not consistently reported details on records management problems or recommended practices that were discovered as a result of its studies. Without more comprehensive evaluations of agency records management, NARA has limited assurance that agencies are appropriately managing the records in their custody and that important records are not lost.

Meanwhile, the White House is threatening a veto of the Electronic Message Preservation Act.  According to the National Coalition for History, the bill “would direct the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) to establish standards for the capture, management, preservation and retrieval of federal agency and presidential electronic messages that are records in an electronic format.”  (Further info on the bill here, and on issues concerning the White House’s e-mail retention practices here.)

Hat tip regarding the GAO report to David Mattison at the Ten-Thousand Year Blog.  Hat tip regarding the bill to BNA’s Privacy Law Watch.

It’s our blog and so we made an editorial decision, like we do every single day. We didn’t attempt to silence Violet. We unpublished our own work. There’s a big difference between that and censorship.

We hope you’ll respect our choice to keep the reasons behind this private. We do understand the confusion this caused for some, especially since we fight hard for openness and transparency. We were trying to do the right thing quietly and respectfully, without embarrassing the parties involved.

Clearly, that didn’t work out. In attempting to defuse drama, we inadvertently ignited more. Mind you, we weren’t the ones splashing gasoline around; but we did make the fire possible. We’re sorry about that. In the meantime, Boing Boing’s past content is indexed on the Wayback Machine, a basic Internet resource; so the material should still be available for those who would like to read it.

Oddly, BoingBoing speaks in terms of “unpublishing” rather than deletion.   (Their policy page states “We reserve the right to unpublish or refuse to unpublish anything for any or no reason.”)  Sure, “unpublishing” sounds less big-brothery than deletion, but I don’t really see the difference.

Moreover, “unpublishing” isn’t quite accurate: BoingBoing doesn’t mean “unpublished” in the sense of a book (or blog posting) that has yet to be published.  They mean disabling public access to something that has already been posted, like in the DMCA 512(c) sense where material is removed or access to it is disabled.  (Wordpress does have an “unpublishing” function, but that’s still a misnomer.)  A more accurate term might be deposting, depublishing, or good ‘ol deletion.

Nevertheless, it’s useful to explore a potential distinction between deletion and depublishing, and other questions raised when a blogger wants to remove posted materials:

• As a starting point, what is the meaning of “publication” in an age where materials can be changed or removed?
• Under what circumstances is depublication justified?
• What practices are needed to distinguish “depublication” from “deletion?”  Is a reservation of rights declaring a right of depublication sufficient?  Should a notice be posted where the materials used to be (as Dan Markel suggests)?
• BoingBoing notes that the removed materials remain on the Wayback Machine web archive.  Do web archives help to justify depublication?
• Does depublication serve an important social function by severing the association between author and depublished content?

Hat tip to Noam Cohen.  And a disclaimer: I did make some edits to this post after posting.

Hmm.  I wonder if the timing of Google’s change-of-heart had anything to do with this week’s court order that Google produce records of millions of YouTube user’s viewing habits.

By the way, the picture in the sidebar is the National Archives building being built way-back when.

Happy Independence Day!

ADDENDUM: Wired has posted a short, interesting piece on the early mistreatment of the document, and more recent efforts to preserve it.